Climate Change Taking Major Toll Now, UN Report Says

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Climate change has already taken a serious toll on human
well-being and world economies, and the world is generally poorly
prepared to deal with the immediate and future threats imposed by
a warming planet.

More than 700 scientific authors and editors contributed to the
report that was released yesterday (March 30), titled "Climate
Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability," and many of
those contributors convened in Yokohama, Japan, last week to
share their findings with representatives of about 100
governments. The group held hearings in which they articulated
just how bad the current situation is and what options and limits
governments currently face in considering ways of adapting to
changes in heat
waves, flooding and other climate hazards in the future.
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"We do not only focus on heat waves, flooding, sea level rise,
and other global and distant trends, but on their immediate
effects on infrastructures, human health, water resources and
other things we humans value," Patricia Romero-Lankao, a
researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in
Boulder, Colo. and an author on the report, told Live Science
while she was in Yokohama.

The group deliberately emphasized
climate change's broad effects on humans living today,
not in the distant future.

"One of the most important findings is that we are not in an era
where climate change is some kind of future hypothetical," Chris
Field, a researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science and
co-chair of the IPCC group responsible for producing this report,
said during a news conference Sunday (March 30). "We see impacts
from the equators to the poles, and from the coasts to the
mountains. There is no question that we live in a world that is
already altered by climate change."

Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State
University who was not an author but was an independent expert
reviewer of this latest report, thinks the report does a better
job than previous ones in making clear the immediacy of climate
change.

"The report goes into far greater detail than past reports in
outlining how climate-related stresses on water, land and food
are already leading to increased conflict, and how climate change
will increasingly become a national security threat as warming
continues," Mann told Live Science.

Every continent on Earth has already experienced some effect of
climate change, Mann said. Different regions face different kinds
of threats, from rising sea levels around low-lying Pacific
islands, to increased drought and heat waves elsewhere in the
world.

An additional report from the IPCC will be released April 11, and
will cover options for mitigating climate change.